Exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, are defined as any planet orbiting a star other than the sun, making them by definition outside our solar system. As you might imagine, that makes them pretty difficult to see (our Solar System is large relative to our technology, after all). However, observing them just got a lot easier thanks to the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), which just released its first images taken in November.

The GPI was designed, developed and built expressly for this purpose, and it’s mounted on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Though the images it takes are far from high definition, they’re an order of magnitude better than anything used in the past.

“Even these early first-light images are almost a factor of 10 better than the previous generation of instruments. In one minute, we are seeing planets that used to take us an hour to detect,” says Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who led the team that built the instrument.

Even still, the planets it observes can be studied in detail by astronomers. The Gemini Planet Imager works by detecting heat radiation from young, gaseous planets that orbit their stars in wide arcs, much like the giant planets in our own Solar System.

“Most planets that we know about to date are only known because of indirect methods that tell us a planet is there, a bit about its orbit and mass, but not much else,” says Macintosh. “With GPI we directly image planets around stars – it’s a bit like being able to dissect the system and really dive into the planet’s atmospheric makeup and characteristics.”

Given that the Gemini Planet Imager is unfathomably complex yet the approximate size of a compact car, its first observations in November 2013 went off surprisingly hitch-free. “This was one of the smoothest first-light runs Gemini has ever seen” says Stephen Goodsell, who manages the project for the observatory.

For GPI’s first observations, the team targeted previously known planetary systems, including the well-known Beta Pictoris system. The first-light team also used the instrument’s polarization mode – which can detect starlight scattered by tiny particles – to study a faint ring of dust orbiting the very young star HR4796A. Previously, only the edges of this dust ring could be seen, but with GPI astronomers can follow the entire circumference of the ring, leading to more detailed exploration.

Not just a one-trick pony, the Gemini Planet Imager is also useful for observing planets within our own Solar System. When images of Jupiter’s moon Europa taken by Voyagers 1 and 2 are compared to those taken by GPI, the resolution is nowhere near as high. Still its observations could help in following surface alterations on icy satellites of Jupiter or atmospheric phenomena (e.g. clouds, haze) on Saturn’s moon Titan.

“Seeing a planet close to a star after just one minute, was a thrill, and we saw this on only the first week after the instrument was put on the telescope!” says Fredrik Rantakyro a Gemini staff scientist working on the instrument. “Imagine what it will be able to do once we tweak and completely tune its performance.”

“The entire exoplanet community is excited for GPI to usher in a whole new era of planet finding,” says physicist and exoplanet expert Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seager, who is not affiliated with the project adds, “Each exoplanet detection technique has its heyday. First it was the radial velocity technique (ground-based planet searches that started the whole field). Second it was the transit technique (namely Kepler). Now,” she says, “it is the ‘direct imaging’ planet-finding technique’s turn to make waves.”

The Gemini Planet Imager team intends to launch a larger-scale survey in 2014, examining some 600 stars to see what planets might orbit them.